There he says:  “It’s no use o’ talkin’, I’ll git to my sweetheart: 
  Body and life I’ll stake, cravat and embroidered suspenders.” 
  Woop! but he jumps!  And now he talks to hisself, goin’ furder,
  Giddy, belike, in his head, but pushes for’ard to Rheinau,
  Eglisau, and Kaiserstuhl, and Zurzach, and Waldshut,—­
  All are behind him, passin’ one village after another
  Down to Grenzach, and out on the broad and beautiful bottoms
  Nigh unto Basle; and there he must stop and look after his license.

* * * * *

Look! isn’t that y’r bridegroom a-comin’ down yonder to meet you?—­
Yes, it’s him, it’s him, I hear’t, for his voice is so jolly! 
Yes, it’s him, it’s him,—­with his eyes as blue as the heavens,
With his Swiss knee-breeches o’ green, and suspenders o’ velvet,
With his shirt o’ the color o’ pearl, and buttons o’ crystal,
With his powerful loins, and his sturdy back and his shoulders,
Grand in his gait, commandin’, beautiful, free in his motions,
Proud as a Basle Councilman,—­yes, it’s the big boy o’ Gothard![B]

[Footnote B:  The Rhine.]

The daring with which Hebel countrifies (or, rather, farmerizes, to translate Goethe’s—­word more literally) the spirit of natural objects, carrying his personifications to that point where the imaginative borders on the grotesque, is perhaps his strongest characteristic.  His poetic faculty, putting on its Alemannic costume, seems to abdicate all ambition of moving in a higher sphere of society, but within the bounds it has chosen allows itself the utmost range of capricious enjoyment.  In another pastoral, called “The Oatmeal Porridge,” he takes the grain which the peasant has sown, makes it a sentient creature, and carries it through the processes of germination, growth, and bloom, without once dropping the figure or introducing an incongruous epithet.  It is not only a child, but a child of the Black Forest, uttering its hopes, its anxieties, and its joys in the familiar dialect.  The beetle, in his eyes, becomes a gross, hard-headed boor, carrying his sacks of blossom-meal, and drinking his mug of XX morning-dew; the stork parades about to show his red stockings; the spider is at once machinist and civil engineer; and even the sun, moon, and morning-star are not secure from the poet’s familiarities.  In his pastoral of “The Field-Watchmen,” he ventures to say,—­

  Mister Schoolmaster Moon, with y’r forehead wrinkled with teachin’,
  With y’r face full o’ larnin’, a plaster stuck on y’r cheek-bone,
  Say, do y’r children mind ye, and larn their psalm and their texes?

We much fear that this over-quaintness of fancy, to which the Alemannic dialect gives such a racy flavor, and which belongs, in a lesser degree, to the minds of the people who speak that dialect, cannot be successfully clothed in an English dress.  Let us try, therefore, a little poem, the sentiment whereof is of universal application:—­